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what I learnt from my first serious haskell programm
by Fawzi Mohamed 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

Hi everybody, I came to haskell recently (one month) and I have now written my first serious program. I am still busy improving it, but here is a small report of what I learned and and my impressions of the language. I found no show stoppers, but a couple of things that I didn't like much. * namespaces * First off something that disturbed me but does not seem to be discussed much are namespaces, or rather the lack of them. Yes I know that haskell does have namespaces, but with object oriented languages you basically get a namespace for each class, in haskell you need modules, and I often like to have groups of related types in the same module. This might seem like a small issue, but the fact when a program or library grows it gets worse, and for me having a consistent way of calling functions is very important, it lets me spend less time thinking about naming. This is something makes the difference between a set of libraries and well thought out framework. Records then also put everything in the module namespace, and it seems that this misfeature has already been discussed. Anyway the namespaces would not be a problem if one would use always the most specialized function (and throw an error is no such function exist) as for example is done by Aldor ( http://www.aldor.org ) a language with a very nice type system, that unfortunately has been kind of dying for a long time because of its closed source. So I am wondering how people cope with them, share your opinion, for me the best thing seem to be to try to use one module per "big" type, and then "import qualified x as y", what are good coding practices? * space leaks * Sure enough in my program I had a space leak, actually an exponential space leak. The short story: it did bite me, and I think that many people that have problems with the performance in haskell, is because of them. The whole story is that I wanted to find the optimal node at depth n of an infinite tree. I even wrote down the list of the optimal nodes at each depth from which I would take some, but even before compiling it I realized that this would never be efficient. So I passed the maximum depth as argument to the function that generates and immediately reduces the tree. It had a huge space leak, and I knew what was happening, the function wad doing a breath first search of the tree instead of a depth first search, so I put a seq to make it go deeper first. It helped, but a space leak was still there. So I used the profiler, and basically the default profiler is useless for space leaks (it just says the total amount allocated which was constant). After some thinking I finally found out (a posteriori obvious) that I had to fully evaluate the actual node the the depth, and finally return the list. In the meantime I had introduced a couple of seq too much, and also switched to a strict data structure (which helped a little but was not the biggest issue. I really looked into memory profiling after having fixed the problem (but having seen how much work it could be even when you know where the problem is). I tried to use it and I think that it would have been useful, I will see how much with the next bug. With respect to this bibliographical heap profile (+RTS -hb) is broken on my AMD 64 Linux machine with GHC 6.6.20070129, I submitted a bug. * vector & matrices * A thing that bothered me a little was the absence of good standardized vectors and matrices, for now I rolled my own 3x3, I have seen numerical prelude, maybe in the future thre will be a standard interface for matrixes... Rolling my own mattrixes/vectors I have hit against some limitations of classes, nothing terrible, but not so nice, and something that I gather is known for example the fact that you cannot overload + or (in haskell 98) you cannot have overlapping instances. Again (see namespaces problem) changing names for the operations is the way out but it is not so nice. * parallel * For the future I want to make my algorithm parallel using threads (should be easy) . Then I was thinking about being parallel between computers, so to have really make this exercice a test if I really can switch to haskell for my programming, I was thinking about MPI, suggestions? thanks for having read till here :) Fawzi

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Re: [Haskell] Call-by-name: moved to haskell-cafe
by Dan Weston 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

Dan Weston wrote: > Douglas Philips wrote: >> On 2007 Mar 20, at 3:30 PM, Dan Weston indited: >> >>> I looked up John Backus on wikipedia and followed a link to ALGOL: >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_60 >>> where the following "undesirable" property of call-by-name is mentioned. >>> >>> "ALGOL 60 allowed for two evaluation strategies for parameter >>> passing: the common call-by-value, and call-by-name. Call-by-name had >>> certain limitations in contrast to call-by-reference, making it an >>> undesirable feature in language design. For example, it is impossible >>> in ALGOL 60 to develop a procedure that will swap the values of two >>> parameters if the actual parameters that are passed in are an integer >>> variable and an array that is indexed by that same integer variable. >>> However, call-by-name is still beloved of ALGOL implementors for the >>> interesting thunks that are used to implement it." >>> >>> I suppose that call-by-name is still beloved of Haskell implementors >>> as well? >> >> Notice that the "problem" with call-by-name is when side-effects are >> involved. In a pure-functional-environment those "problems" don't >> arise... >> >> --Doug > > It was the phrase "making it an undesirable feature in language design" > that jumped out at me. Here "language" is an implicitly universally > quantified variable, and the phrase beta-reduces to "call-by-name is an > undesirable feature in Haskell design". >

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parsec error message
by david karapetyan 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

i get the following error message new.o:fake:(.text+0x85): undefined reference to `parseczm2zi0_TextziParserCombin atorsziParsecziChar_oneOf_closure' new.o:fake:(.rodata+0x4): undefined reference to `parseczm2zi0_TextziParserCombi natorsziParsecziChar_oneOf_closure' collect2: ld returned 1 exit status when compiling the following code module Main where import System.Environment import Text.ParserCombinators.Parsec hiding (spaces) symbol = oneOf "!$%&|*+-/:<=>?@^_~" main = do return 1 any help is greatly appreciated. i am running ghc-6.6 on a windows xp machine.

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Two Other AI Sources
by Adam Wyner 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

For the Haskell and AI work, we ought to consider AI programming books in addition to Russell and Norvig: /Paradigms of AI Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp/, P. Norvig, 1991. /Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence/, I. Bratko, 1990./ Artificial Intelligence Techniques in Prolog/, Y. Shoham, 1994. Perhaps there are newer additions (e.g. Bratko), but the problems and solutions from these languages are presented. We can build on them rather than starting from scratch or even just the theoretical outline of Russell and Norvig. Adam

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Search monad
by Edsko de Vries 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

Hey, I have a structure containing Xs in various places, like so data X data Structure = Structure .. [X] .. [X] .. And I defined mapStructure mapStructure :: (X -> X) -> (Structure -> Structure) I then wanted to use mapStructure to define queries as well as transformations on structures. I generalized mapStructure to mapStructureM: mapStructure :: Monad m => (X -> m X) -> (Structure -> m Structure) and then defined the following search monad: > data Search f a b = Found (f a) b > > class Monad (m a) => SearchMonad m a where > found :: a -> m a a > > fromSearch :: Search f a b -> f a > fromSearch (Found a _) = a > > search :: (SearchMonad m a) => (a -> Bool) -> a -> m a a > search f a > | f a = found a > | otherwise = return a Instances of the monad for finding one and for finding all elements: > instance SearchMonad (Search Maybe) a where > found a = Found (Just a) a > > instance SearchMonad (Search []) a where > found a = Found [a] a > > instance Monad (Search Maybe a) where > return b = Found Nothing b > Found (Just a) a' >>= f = case f a' of > Found _ b -> Found (Just a) b > Found Nothing a' >>= f = f a' > > instance Monad (Search [] a) where > return b = Found [] b > Found as a' >>= f = case f a' of > Found as' b -> Found (as ++ as') b Here is a simple sample session with ghci *Util> fromSearch $ mapM (search even) [1,3,5] :: Maybe Int Nothing *Util> fromSearch $ mapM (search even) [1,2,3,4,5] :: Maybe Int Just 2 *Util> fromSearch $ mapM (search even) [1,2,3,4,5] :: [Int] [2,4] What I'm wondering about is if this monad is an instance of a more general monad(if so, which one?), and generally if people have any comments about these definitions. Thanks! Edsko

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wanted: haskell one-liners (in the perl sense of one-liners)
by Thomas Hartman 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

Okay, I am aware of http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Simple_unix_tools which gives some implementation of simple unix utilities in haskell. But I couldn't figure out how to use them directly from the shell, and of course that's what most readers will probably wnat. Or let me put it another way. Is there a way to do find -maxdepth 1 -type f | xargs du | perl -ane 'print "\$F[0]\n"' | perl -e '$sum += $_ while <>; print "$sum\n"' as a shell command that idiomatically uses haskell? For non-perlers, that sums up the disk usage of all files in the current directory, skipping subdirs. print "\$F[0]\n looks at the first (space delimited) collumn of output. perl -e '$sum += $_ while <>; print "$sum\n"' , which is I guess the meat of the program, sums up all the numbers spewed out of the first column, so in the end you get a total. So, anyone out there want to establish a haskell one liner tradition? :) thomas.

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: wanted: haskell one-liners (in the perl sense of one-liners)
by Thomas Hartman 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

You contributed #12:14 < Thunder> @pl \s -> drop (length s - n) s #12:14 < lambdabot> drop =<< subtract n . length But, on second thought, 1) I can't use this as a drop-in replacement for the non points free (right term?) version, and 2) I don't really understand it. Still, I would be curious to see if there is a way to make this useful somehow. 2007/3/20, Lutz Donnerhacke <lutz(a)iks-jena.de>: > In iks.lists.haskell, you wrote: > > This takes a long file containing mostly numerical data, filters out > > the numerical data, and sorts it numerically. (Not the same thing as > > sorting alphabetically, which is what you get by default, or using the > > unix sort utility). Maybe there's some flag to make unix sort util act > > like this? Enh, who cares, now we have haskell. :) > > sort -g > > > Thanks to Thunder > > I was not that helpful. >

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Haskell-cafe] Haskell and a new web developement mailinglist?
by Dimitry Golubovsky 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

Marco Weber wrote: >I've been talking to Chris Eidhof the last days and we'd like to suggest adding >another specialized haskell mailinglist: Haskell and web developement. I support the idea to have such a mailing list. Thanks. -- Dimitry Golubovsky Anywhere on the Web

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NYTimes.com: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies
by paul.hudak＠yale.edu 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

This page was sent to you by: paul.hudak(a)yale.edu. John Backus, inventor of Fortran, Turing Award winner, and also an early pioneer in functional programming, died Saturday at his home in Oregon. Many of us have fond memories of him in the earlier days of our careers, and we all owe a lot to him for giving credibility to functional programming through his Turing Award lecture, "Can Programming Be Libarated From the von Neumann style?" Here is an article from the New York Times. BUSINESS | March 20, 2007 John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies By STEVE LOHR Mr. Backus assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/business/20backus.html?ex=1175054400&en=d… ---------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THIS E-MAIL This e-mail was sent to you by a friend through NYTimes.com's E-mail This Article service. For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help(a)nytimes.com. NYTimes.com 500 Seventh Avenue New York, NY 10018 Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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Re: [Haskell-cafe] what I learnt from my first serious haskell programm
by Fawzi Mohamed 20 Mar '07

20 Mar '07

oops, I realized now that my answer did not go to the list. For the record here is it: Thanks to everybody for the answers and to Henning Thielemann for the useful links: > http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Qualified_names > > http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Category:Style > I agree with apfelmus that recursive module should be supported (as the standard requires) this would make it easier to use one module per main type (the distributed approach), this approach was also what I had in mind, but it comes very close to introducing by hand one namespace per type from which came my rant about missing namespaces... Fawzi

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